This delightful book takes you into the kitchens of people who know what pasta is really all about – great flavor from great ingredients, shared with those you love. Their expertise doesn’t hurt either! These Pasta Grannies are not professional chefs, but rather home cooks who have been making pasta for decades. By necessity they use the freshest and most local ingredients, grown in their own home gardens or locally foraged, to create pasta dishes that include nuts and herbs, vegetables and pulses, seafood, and even meat.

The China Study is based on a whole foods, plant-based (WFPB) diet, that avoids meat, dairy, added oil, and sugar. The WFPB diet was researched and written about by T. Colin Campbell, PhD. The China Study Cookbook (Revised and Expanded Edition) is written by Campbell’s daughter, LeAnne Campbell, PhD. According to the original China study, many research studies found that a diet containing animal protein is detrimental to your health.

Mozza at Home is a highly sophisticated, predominantly Italian cookbook by restaurateur/chef Nancy Silverton, written for sophisticated home cooks. The average home cook will not benefit from this cookbook. Silverton uses many unusual, difficult-to-find, costly ingredients that she can purchase near her Umbria home in Italy, but the quantities are given in American units.

Here we have an awesome book far more than a mere cookbook; a travelogue including a large collection of good recipes. Dishing Up Minnesota by an excellent food/travel writer Teresa Marrone ought to be in the collection of every Minnesota cook, yet every cook outside this state will love this cookbook.

The Peppermint Bark Cookbook is an unusual, very specialized baking book few bakers would benefit from owning. Dominique DeVito presents a large number of recipes, all based on the basic peppermint bark recipe or variations thereof. You need to be a dedicated bark maker to gain much. A predominantly holiday specialty introduced by Williams-Sonoma in the late 1990s, peppermint bark became a seasonal favorite in many homes, but few bakers attempt to make it.

Happy Hens and Fresh Eggs is not just a cookbook. It’s also a chicken owner’s handbook, walking first-time chicken owners and veteran egg collectors alike through a year of chicken care, season by season. Author Signe Langford’s knowledge of all things chicken care and egg cooking shows through spectacularly in this clever hybrid book.

If you only want one vegan cookbook, Jessica Prescott’s Vegan Goodness is a good choice. In a medium-format hardcover, Prescott illustrates her cookbook with her own photos, and they are outstanding, filling a good part of the pages and illustrating nearly every recipe. Vegan cooking is not the easiest to do in the kitchen with the expectation of full flavor, but Prescott’s recipes are very good, and she offers huge varieties.

Here is a very perplexing cookbook. Deep South is all about Southern cooking and Southern ways—yet it was published in the UK, and its primary ingredient measurements are metric. Our accustomed American units are in parentheses, and more often in fractions, thus making them rather inconvenient for our own home cooks.

By combining the classic ease and comfort of the appliance with the modern sensibility of today’s tastes, this cookbook reminds us that, for those looking for an easy, stress-free way to a hearty dish, the slow-cooker never really goes out of style. This is not a book full of ‘healthy’ recipes; delicious slow-cooker recipes require fats and lots of seasoning, and these recipes are written for taste.

Gluten-free eating is all the rage now. There are lots of gluten-free choices in the stores for ready-made or ready-to-make dishes, so why a new gluten-free cookbook? The reality is a lot of people don’t want processed or pre-packaged foods. This wonderful new cookbook is chock full of recipes that are relatively easy to make from scratch with fresh, wholesome ingredients.